Trial model of a part of the Analytical Engine, built by Babbage, as displayed at the Science Museum (London)
The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage.[ It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, a design for a simpler mechanical computer.
The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.
In other words, the logical structure of the Analytical Engine was
essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the
electronic era. The Analytical Engine is one of the most successful achievements of Charles Babbage.
Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his
machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate
funding. It was not until 1941 that the first general-purpose computer, Z3, was actually built, more than a century after Babbage had proposed the pioneering Analytical Engine in 1837.
Design
Two types of punched cards used to program the machine. Foreground: 'operational cards', for inputting instructions; background: 'variable cards', for inputting data
Babbage's first attempt at a mechanical computing device, the Difference Engine, was a special-purpose machine designed to tabulate logarithms and trigonometric functions by evaluating finite differences to create approximating polynomials. Construction of this machine was never completed; Babbage had conflicts with his chief engineer, Joseph Clement, and ultimately the British government withdrew its funding for the project.
During this project, he realised that a much more general design, the Analytical Engine, was possible. The work on the design of the Analytical Engine started in c. 1833.
The input, consisting of programs ("formulae") and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards, a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard loom. For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. It employed ordinary base-10 fixed-point arithmetic.
There was to be a store (that is, a memory) capable of holding 1,000 numbers of 40 decimal digits each (ca. 16.2 kB). An arithmetic unit (the "mill") would be able to perform all four arithmetic operations, plus comparisons and optionally square roots. Initially (1838) it was conceived as a difference engine curved back upon itself, in a generally circular layout, with the long store exiting off to one side. Later drawings (1858) depict a regularised grid layout. Like the central processing unit (CPU) in a modern computer, the mill would rely upon its own internal procedures,
to be stored in the form of pegs inserted into rotating drums called
"barrels", to carry out some of the more complex instructions the user's
program might specify.
The programming language to be employed by users was akin to modern day assembly languages. Loops and conditional branching were possible, and so the language as conceived would have been Turing-complete as later defined by Alan Turing.
Three different types of punch cards were used: one for arithmetical
operations, one for numerical constants, and one for load and store
operations, transferring numbers from the store to the arithmetical unit
or back. There were three separate readers for the three types of
cards. Babbage developed some two dozen programs for the Analytical
Engine between 1837 and 1840, and one program later. These programs treat polynomials, iterative formulas, Gaussian elimination, and Bernoulli numbers.
In 1842, the Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea
published a description of the engine based on a lecture by Babbage in
French. In 1843, the description was translated into English and
extensively annotated by Ada Lovelace,
who had become interested in the engine eight years earlier. In
recognition of her additions to Menabrea's paper, which included a way
to calculate Bernoulli numbers using the machine (widely considered to be the first complete computer program), she has been described as the first computer programmer.
Construction
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Henry Babbage's Analytical Engine Mill, built in 1910, in the Science Museum (London)
Late in his life, Babbage sought ways to build a simplified version
of the machine, and assembled a small part of it before his death in
1871.
In 1878, a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
described the Analytical Engine as "a marvel of mechanical ingenuity",
but recommended against constructing it. The committee acknowledged the
usefulness and value of the machine, but could not estimate the cost of
building it, and were unsure whether the machine would function
correctly after being built.
Intermittently from 1880 to 1910,
Babbage's son Henry Prevost Babbage was constructing a part of the mill
and the printing apparatus. In 1910 it was able to calculate a (faulty)
list of multiples of pi.
This constituted only a small part of the whole engine; it was not
programmable and had no storage. (Popular images of this section have
sometimes been mislabelled, implying that it was the entire mill or even
the entire engine.) Henry Babbage's "Analytical Engine Mill" is on
display at the Science Museum in London.
Henry also proposed building a demonstration version of the full
engine, with a smaller storage capacity: "perhaps for a first machine
ten (columns) would do, with fifteen wheels in each".
Such a version could manipulate 20 numbers of 25 digits each, and what
it could be told to do with those numbers could still be impressive. "It
is only a question of cards and time", wrote Henry Babbage in 1888,
"... and there is no reason why (twenty thousand) cards should not be
used if necessary, in an Analytical Engine for the purposes of the
mathematician".
In 1991, the London Science Museum built a complete and working specimen of Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, a design that incorporated refinements Babbage discovered during the development of the Analytical Engine. This machine was built using materials and engineering tolerances
that would have been available to Babbage, quelling the suggestion that
Babbage's designs could not have been produced using the manufacturing
technology of his time.
In October 2010, John Graham-Cumming
started a "Plan 28" campaign to raise funds by "public subscription" to
enable serious historical and academic study of Babbage's plans, with a
view to then build and test a fully working virtual design which will
then in turn enable construction of the physical Analytical Engine.
As of May 2016, actual construction had not been attempted, since no
consistent understanding could yet be obtained from Babbage's original
design drawings. In particular it was unclear whether it could handle
the indexed variables which were required for Lovelace's Bernoulli
program.
By 2017, the "Plan 28" effort reported that a searchable database of
all catalogued material was available, and an initial review of
Babbage's voluminous Scribbling Books had been completed.
Instruction set
Plan diagram of the Analytical Engine from 1840
Babbage is not known to have written down an explicit set of
instructions for the engine in the manner of a modern processor manual.
Instead he showed his programs as lists of states during their
execution, showing what operator was run at each step with little
indication of how the control flow would be guided.
Allan G. Bromley
has assumed that the card deck could be read in forwards and backwards
directions as a function of conditional branching after testing for
conditions, which would make the engine Turing-complete:
...the cards could be ordered to move forward and reverse (and hence to loop)...
The introduction for the first time, in 1845, of user operations for a variety of service functions including, most importantly, an effective system for user control of looping in user programs. There is no indication how the direction of turning of the operation and variable cards is specified. In the absence of other evidence I have had to adopt the minimal default assumption that both the operation and variable cards can only be turned backward as is necessary to implement the loops used in Babbage's sample programs. There would be no mechanical or microprogramming difficulty in placing the direction of motion under the control of the user.
In their emulator of the engine, Fourmilab say:
The Engine's Card Reader is not constrained to simply process the cards in a chain one after another from start to finish. It can, in addition, directed by the very cards it reads and advised by the whether the Mill's run-up lever is activated, either advance the card chain forward, skipping the intervening cards, or backward, causing previously-read cards to be processed once again.
This emulator does provide a written symbolic instruction set, though
this has been constructed by its authors rather than based on Babbage's
original works. For example, a factorial program would be written as:
N0 6
N1 1
N2 1
×
L1
L0
S1
–
L0
L2
S0
L2
L0
CB?11
where the CB is the conditional branch instruction or "combination
card" used to make the control flow jump, in this case backwards by 11
cards.
Influence
Predicted influence
Babbage understood that the existence of an automatic computer would kindle interest in the field now known as algorithmic efficiency, writing in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher,
"As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the
future course of the science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid,
the question will then arise—By what course of calculation can these
results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?"
Computer science
From 1872 Henry continued diligently with his father's work and then intermittently in retirement in 1875.
Percy Ludgate wrote about the engine in 1914 and published his own design for an Analytical Engine in 1908.
It was drawn up in detail, but never built, and the drawings have never
been found. Ludgate's engine would be much smaller (about 8 cubic feet (230 L)) than Babbage's, and hypothetically would be capable of multiplying two 20-decimal-digit numbers in about six seconds.
Torres y Quevedo wrote about Babbage's engines in Essays on Automatics
(1913). Book contains design for an electromechanical machine capable
of calculating completely automatically the value of a function.
Vannevar Bush's paper Instrumental Analysis
(1936) included several references to Babbage's work. In the same year
started Rapid Arithmetical Machine project to investigate the problems
of constructing an electronic digital computer.
Despite this groundwork, Babbage's work fell into historical
obscurity, and the Analytical Engine was unknown to builders of
electro-mechanical and electronic computing machines in the 1930s and
1940s when they began their work, resulting in the need to re-invent
many of the architectural innovations Babbage had proposed. Howard Aiken, who built the quickly-obsoleted electromechanical calculator, the Harvard Mark I,
between 1937 and 1945, praised Babbage's work likely as a way of
enhancing his own stature, but knew nothing of the Analytical Engine's
architecture during the construction of the Mark I, and considered his
visit to the constructed portion of the Analytical Engine "the greatest
disappointment of my life".
The Mark I showed no influence from the Analytical Engine and lacked
the Analytical Engine's most prescient architectural feature, conditional branching. J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly
similarly were not aware of the details of Babbage's Analytical Engine
work prior to the completion of their design for the first electronic
general-purpose computer, the ENIAC.
Comparison to other early computers
If the Analytical Engine had been built, it would have been digital, programmable and Turing-complete. It would, however, have been very slow. Luigi Federico Menabrea reported in Sketch of the Analytical Engine:
"Mr. Babbage believes he can, by his engine, form the product of two
numbers, each containing twenty figures, in three minutes".
By comparison the Harvard Mark I could perform the same task in just six seconds. A modern PC can do the same thing in well under a billionth of a second.
| Name | First operational | Numeral system | Computing mechanism | Programming | Turing complete | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Difference Engine | Not built until the 1990s | Decimal | Mechanical | Not programmable; initial numerical constants of polynomial differences set physically | No | Physical state of wheels in axes |
| Analytical Engine | Not yet built | Decimal | Mechanical | Program-controlled by punched cards | Yes | Physical state of wheels in axes |
| Bombe (Poland, UK, US) | 1939 (Polish), March 1940 (British), May 1943 (US) | Character computations | Electro-mechanical | Not programmable; cipher input settings specified by patch cables | No | Physical state of rotors |
| Zuse Z3 (Germany) | May 1941 | Binary floating point | Electro-mechanical | Program-controlled by punched 35 mm film stock | In principle | Mechanical relays |
| Atanasoff–Berry Computer (US) | 1942 | Binary | Electronic | Not programmable; linear system coefficients input using punched cards | No | Regenerative capacitor memory |
| Colossus Mark 1 (UK) | December 1943 | Binary | Electronic | Program-controlled by patch cables and switches | No | Thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) and thyratrons |
| Harvard Mark I – IBM ASCC (US) | May 1944 | Decimal | Electro-mechanical | Program-controlled by 24-channel punched paper tape (but no conditional branch) | No | Mechanical relays[44] |
| Zuse Z4 (Germany) | March 1945 (or 1948) | Binary floating point | Electro-mechanical | Program-controlled by punched 35 mm film stock | Yes | Mechanical relays |
| ENIAC (US) | July 1946 | Decimal | Electronic | Program-controlled by patch cables and switches | Yes | Vacuum tube triode flip-flops |
| Manchester Baby (UK) | 1948 | Binary | Electronic | Binary program entered into memory by keyboard (first electronic stored-program digital computer) | Yes | Williams cathode ray tube |
In popular culture
- The cyberpunk novelists William Gibson and Bruce Sterling co-authored a steampunk novel of alternative history titled The Difference Engine in which Babbage's Difference and Analytical Engines became available to Victorian society. The novel explores the consequences and implications of the early introduction of computational technology.
- There is also mention of the Analytical Engine (or the Clockwork Ouroboros as it is also known there) in The Book of the War, a Faction Paradox anthology edited by Lawrence Miles. This machine was used to calculate a way into the "Eleven Day Empire". Its use resulted in the destruction of the original Houses of Parliament.
- In the novel Perdido Street Station, by British author China MiƩville, engines similar to Babbage's serve as "brains" for the robotic constructs of the city of New Crobuzon. One such engine even develops sentient thought due to a recursive algorithmic loop.
- The British Empire of The Peshawar Lancers by S. M. Stirling features a massive water-powered analytical engine at Oxford, used by two of the main characters. It is noted that most of the engines run on steam, and that an even larger one is under construction at the British Capital in Delhi.
- In the Michael Flynn novel In the Country of the Blind, a secret society calling itself the Babbage Society secretly financed the building of Babbage Engines in the mid-19th century. In the novel, the Society uses the Babbage engines along with a statistical science called Cliology to predict and manipulate future history. In the process, they predict the rise of the Nazis and accidentally start the US Civil War.
- In the Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age, ubiquitous molecular nanotechnology is described to make use of "rod logic" similar to that imagined by Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine.
- Moriarty by Modem, a short story by Jack Nimersheim, describes an alternate history where Babbage's Analytical Engine was indeed completed and had been deemed highly classified by the British government. The characters of Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty had in reality been a set of prototype programs written for the Analytical Engine. This short story follows Holmes as his program is implemented on modern computers and he is forced to compete against his nemesis yet again in the modern counterparts of Babbage's Analytical Engine.
- A similar setting is used by Sydney Padua in the webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. It features an alternate history where Ada Lovelace and Babbage have built the Analytical Engine and use it to fight crime at Queen Victoria's request. The comic is based on thorough research on the biographies of and correspondence between Babbage and Lovelace, which is then twisted for humorous effect.
- Georgia on My Mind is a novelette by Charles Sheffield which involves two major themes: being widowed and the quest for a legendary Babbage computer.
- Hugh Cook's fantasy novels The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers and The Wazir and the Witch feature an Analytical Engine created by the scientist Ivan Petrov. It is used to calculate income tax.
- The Orion's Arm online project features the Machina Babbagenseii, fully sentient Babbage inspired mechanical computers. Each is the size of a large asteroid, only capable surviving in microgravity conditions, and processes data at 0.5% the speed of a human brain.
- The flying ships in the anime Last Exile are seen to have analytical engines inside of them. Although some have more advanced technology, the common ships use analytical engines, and even some of the advanced ships are seen to have clockwork mechanisms as well.
- A working version of the Analytical Engine, created by fictional inventor Ernest Harding (and based on the Babbage concept) was featured on the Murdoch Mysteries (also called The Artful Detective), in Season 5, Episode 9, Invention Convention.
